Love Is Watching Someone Die
by slacktension
Summary: Mako slowly passes on in old age, and all Korra can do is watch.


He goes first.

It's shocking to the both of them, because Mako is a born fighter, but the doctors say this is a match he can't win. It's taken him years to trust doctors and even step inside of a hospital, so accustomed to gritting his teeth and willing away pain, that he bows gracefully at their diagnosis.

He's old. He's felt old for years but now it's finally hitting him, that he's 86, and all those early years of hell have caught up.

Korra's hands still look younger than his, skin glowing lovely umber on the backs of her hands, even as her knuckles grow rounder, her nails thicken and the tendons are rigid and shifting. She places them on his chest and shuts her eyes, leaning forward over the sheets on the hospital bed.

"I could've healed all of this years ago," she says, because it's true. If they had known how every poison he subjected his body to for work would come up to haunt him, maybe there would still be time left.

He places his hands on top of hers, and it hurts to look at the tubes pushed into his skin. He should still be wearing his gloves. He smiles.

"I'm not mad," he says, and she starts crying. "You shouldn't be either. I can proudly say that I'm dying happy."

"Don't," she begs.

He's still stubborn so he sits up and kisses her wispy-haired temple.

"Take me home," he says.

She's still strong and bullheaded, so she stands up and moves to lift him herself, and he laughs when the orderlies come rushing in to scold the Avatar and her husband for trying to break him from the hospital like a prison.

—-

"It was just the shock," she says, leaning over their bed back home, hunched with her terrible posture. "That's why I cried. Don't flatter yourself."

He rolls his eyes and snorts, but it morphs into a hacking cough. Their son rushes forward and tries to pat his back, but they both scold him away.

"You cried because I'm your _forever boy_," he teases once the coughs leave him.

Korra pouts. "One time. I say it _one time_, and you never let it go."

"It's better than City Boy," he says, settling back into the pillows and shutting his eyes. "Always was."

Their daughter sighs loudly and taps her foot against the wooden floor. "What was the actual diagnosis? What did the doctors say?"

"Don't worry about it," Mako says.

"I just want to know what we're up against."

He cracks open one eye and looks at his wife by his bedside. "_What we're up against?_ We raised a pair of fighters, huh?"

Korra laughs and both of their children scold them for not taking any of this seriously.

—-

Their son gets it in his head that Mako's life story needs to be recorded, and he's just the person to do it. Never having a concrete trait in common with each other, Mako just sighs and agrees to answer his questions, even if, _"I'll get some mention in the books about your mother. And there's going to be thousands of them. I've got to show up on at least one page."_

Their children get the medical diagnosis through their father's history.

"I worked in the mines for a while," he says. "I was nine. Then the textile mills - actually, that was my first job. And a blacking factory."

"Blacking?" their son repeats, thick fingers stilling over the keys of his typewriter.

"Shoe polish," Mako waves his hand. "It smelled terrible. The fumes were visible in the air. I worked 13 to 18 hour shifts."

Once the mentions of the gangs come in, their son and daughter are morbidly excited. Their father never mentioned his work with the Triads, but they had seen him in their youth turn from their father into a fighter before their eyes in a few scraps in the city. Run-ins with his old friends while running errands with his kids, insults coded and shoulders hunched.

"You were never supposed to see that," Mako laments, and his voice grows weaker as his speaks but not from his illness.

"Dad, I ran numbers as a kid before you and Mom adopted me," their son says, rolling his eyes.

"I remember you just brought your fingers together," their daughter says, lifting her hand with her index and middle fingers extended. "And they nearly -"

"- They shit their pants, is what they did."

"_Language_, young man," Mako scolds and he starts coughing again.

Korra happens to be walking by at that moment and she steps into the room, hands on her hips. "Alright, you've bothered him enough. Everybody out."

"Aw, Mom."

"Out."

"We haven't even finished asking him about -"

"- If he dies tonight, I can tell you it all anyway," Korra says, moving to the edge of his bed and handing him a glass of water. She lifts her head to her adult children standing near the door, and her eyes sharpen, going from _mom_ to _Avatar_. "_Out_."

They leave as Mako's coughing dies, and he leans back into bed with a sigh. He shuts his eyes and flips over his hand, giving her his palm expectantly. She sits on the edge of the bed and holds his hand.

"I don't want a book about me," he says quietly, and Korra knows this. He's doing it to give their children peace of mind before he passes. "You know everything about me and that's all that's ever mattered."

—-

Korra wakes up and she knows it's going to happen today. She looks over at him in their shared bed, and he's awake, slowly reading a book because he still struggles with certain words. The sun still isn't up but as they got older, Korra woke up with him at dawn. Now his aching lungs and knees don't let him sleep throughout the night.

He looks down at her over his glasses. Their eyes meet.

She's stared into gold countless times and it's just like their first fight together, against those chi-blockers, where they worked in sync without uttering a single word.

He knows. She knows.

Her throat tenses up for a second before she sighs, sits up, and climbs out of bed to make tea.

She makes breakfast for him and the kids, and they eat it in the bedroom, listening to the radio. Neither of them make any mention to their children about it.

—-

It's night when he dies.

Once the kids are asleep in their childhood rooms, he lets his fatigue catch up with him. He sinks into the pillows and he breathes rasping breaths through his mouth, his chest rising and falling jerkily, thick eyelids too heavy to lift even though he's awake.

But he keeps talking, acting like he still has so much to say.

"I never thought," he says, breathing between each word. "I never thought I'd die in a bed."

She dons gloves of water and runs her hands around his chest, his temples, his joints, just to take the pain away.

"I never thought I'd get married. Or have children. Ones that can read, no less," he smiles and coughs, but that one is supposed to be a laugh. "Or that I'd have a career."

"You're missing one," Korra says, swirling her hands over his chest because his lungs are black from years of work. "The most _amazing_ thing that's ever happened to you."

"You," he says simply, smiling.

She ticks her tongue against her teeth in disapproval. "No fight this time?"

"There's no need," he says, smile pulling wider. "I don't need to go down fighting."

—-

They go to bed. The lights are off and the moon is full, shining through the window. She holds him as the coughs and breaths leave his body, feeling the life drain and slip through her fingers like water.

There's a panicked moment she has only felt when she lost her bending, when everything is impossible and all hope is lost, because his pulse is no longer at his jaw and she won't wake up tomorrow looking into gold.

But she's a fighter. Like him.

She kisses him on the forehead once, in their bed, in their home, and steps out to wake their children.

—-

Bolin gives the eulogy at the funeral. Korra doesn't cry like he does. Instead she sits in the front row, holding her children's hands, smiling because the only person Bolin can look at is her when he struggles to speak. Mako isn't there to be strong for his 84 year old brother, but Korra is.

The whole world goes into mourning because the Avatar is in mourning. Nobody really cares for one police officer who lived and died a happy man, except for those that know him.

—-

A year later, Korra, fit as ever, visits his plot.

It's simple and with his parents. She holds a book in her hand and she cocks her hip out to the side, waving it before his name engraved on the tombstone.

"Well, they did it," she says. "Our children wrote a book about you."

She can see him rolling his eyes and opening his mouth to argue, to say there's no need. She plops down on the ground and folds her legs, holding up the cover.

"Yeah, yeah, I know. I agree, you don't need a book. But hey, I never thought our son would be a novelist, so maybe there's some good in this thing after all," she laughs.

She takes the book and flips it open to a dog-eared page. She tears it out with jagged edges, and holds it up to her face.

"Here's my favorite part:_ at age 18, he is the captain of the Fire Ferrets, with a solid winning streak. The night he pulls of the second greatest hat trick in pro-bending history, he meets the Avatar and, by his own admission, is 'too stupid to realize it's love at first sight'_. Cute, huh?"

His voice deadpans in her head,_ yeah, real cute._

She laughs and crumples the page in her fist, setting it on fire so the ashes fall into her palm. She leans forward and tugs out his urn, pulling off the lid and places the ashes inside.

"There's another few pages I want you to keep," she says, flipping through the book to more marked sections. She rips them all out and reads them aloud: the day he admits he loves her, the day he becomes a cop, the day they are married, the day Bolin is married, when they meet their children. She sets them all aflame and mixes them into his ashes.

"It's a little redundant," she admits, capping the lid and putting him back into place. "But your spirit carries the memories, not your body. I figured you wouldn't want to take your chances with either of them forgetting."

She leans forward and examines his name. The birth date and death date. The names and dates of his parents.

"I'm not coming soon," she admits. She's got more life in her. She could make it to one hundred, the doctors say, while Avatar Aang just shrugs and laughs and says, _who cares?_ "It's a good thing you were always patient."

She stays for as long as she can. She ends up crying for a bit until he convinces her that it's stupid. Then she feels crazy for talking to him and shrieking with laughter in a quiet cemetery, but she doesn't care.

She stands and lifts her hand.

"Alright. I love you. Goodbye."


End file.
